


turpentine and patches

by strangeness



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-09 14:54:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4353212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangeness/pseuds/strangeness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing is, Chloe has gotten really good at using her imagination.</p>
            </blockquote>





	turpentine and patches

**I.**

By the time she is fifteen years old, Chloe has heard the story of her birth in gory detail. Her mother seems to think that the event was so earth shattering and bizarre that she can’t help but bust it out at any point; and to Chloe, it’s reminiscent of the way a bank robber pulls out a gun when staging a hold up. This time, Joyce chooses to hold both her and Max hostage at the dining room table, and the look that passes over her mother’s face is enough for Chloe to know just which story in her arsenal she’s about to unleash.

“Mom,” Chloe begins, warning, almost scolding the woman. Joyce shoots her this look that gives Chloe approximately two seconds to take back the tone of voice that she’s speaking in, and Chloe does, grudgingly, and with a pleading look at her mom not to burst out with the messy details of her entrance into this world.

Joyce sees the look, the centre of her brow creasing for a moment before, miraculously, she relents. Chloe relaxes, and beside her, she swears she can sense Max doing the same. They are given approximately three seconds of relief before Joyce decides to rail into them with the tale anyway.

“Max, have I ever told you—“

Chloe recoils, launching herself up from the table with a disgusted “ugh!” She lets herself slip into the kitchen, where she pours herself a glass of Tropicana, watching it brim in the transparent glass before taking a long sip.

Joyce looks less than amused. “Chloe, I’m not going to get into the miracle of childbirth. I just want Max to know about the craziness that went down leading up to it.” Chloe swallows the juice in her mouth to find both Max and Joyce glancing at her, her mom’s face one of expectation, her friend’s one of curiosity.

Chloe sighs, weakly waving a hand. “Go on,”

Joyce is speaking before the words are even completely out of Chloe’s mouth. “So, Max…here’s the deal.” Joyce leans forward, resting her elbows against the table, and Max gives a slight, amused smile at the change in posture.

“It happened when William was out of town…” Joyce elaborates after a moment, waving a vague hand that implies that it meant the act of birth. “I was at the diner—“

“Working?” Max asks, and Chloe turns to glance at Max, tilting her head. “Joyce, you were _pregnant_.”

Her mom laughs. “Max, when have you known me to let something like that stop me?” Chloe sets the empty glass on the counter with a soft clink and continues to eye her friend, who gives her a knowing and fleeting glance. “So, there I am, at the diner, and my water breaks, right there.” A laugh courses out of her mother’s throat, her head turning down in recollection. “You know, it’s a little embarrassing now, but I really thought I was gonna have to push this one—“ she nods at her daughter, “out in The Two Whales.”

“So what happened?” Max asks her, Chloe can’t stop looking at her.

“This is the weird part. Total stranger comes up to me. She has to be…twenty-one, twenty-two? Real young girl…” Joyce seems to be trying to memorizing her face before diving back in to her story. “She tells me to give her my keys and she drives me to the hospital.

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.” Joyce answers. “Then, this one came and I’ve had a headache ever since.” Chloe files that one away to complain about at a later date.

“So, like…” Chloe is surprised that it’s occurring to her to ask this for the first time. “…What happened to her?”

“To who?”

“The girl.” Chloe answers.

“I’m—not sure.” Her mom answers, a quizzical expression coming over her face. “She just disappeared after that. Parked my car and was on her way. Kind of a weird lady, you know?”

“She didn’t stay with you?” Chloe asks, finding that a little hard to believe.

“I asked, believe me! She said she was busy.”

“Figures,” Chloe says, looking at Max.

Max, who shrugs. “It figures.”

**II.**

The thing is, Chloe has gotten really good at using her imagination.

And really, she’s always been good with the whole pretending thing. She has spent sixteen years carving her own idealistic mark on the world, and she’s beginning to think that her very existence is a scar on the earth, and really, that’s the way she likes it.

The fact of the matter is that Max has been missing for the better part of six months. In her absence, Chloe has hollowed herself out into something violent, eclectic blues and angry ripped jeans.

Angry is not confined to her trousers, and when she corners Nathan in the girl’s bathroom there is anger there too. Chloe thinks that it’s funny how anger can give way to acceptance the moment she sees the gun, but the trigger is never pulled, even though she still feels as if she’s been shocked.

A fire alarm stutters Nathan out of the bathroom, but Chloe is left staring at a torn photo on the ground—Max, turned away, fairy lights and polaroids overhead like a halo. She remembers taking this one.

Then: movement in the mirror. She thinks she sees something, but it’s gone.

**III.**

“I can’t stick around for long,” Max tells her quickly, breathlessly, when she appears in her doorway after two years. Chloe is on the brink of turning eighteen and blowing out of town, and she’s long since given up hope of Max even being alive.

“Well, thanks for dropping in Max. Did it ever occur to you to call?” Chloe asks her, and her tone has taken on this sharp quality, like keys squeezed between knuckles. She is riding the wave of self defence, like Max is a danger to her safety.

“Chloe, this is going to sound crazy—“

“Where have you _been_?” Chloe asks, not letting her finish, and in the end, curiosity wins out over anger, and a dam breaks. “You fucking _left_ me, Max.” The stillness of the house is infuriating, and she finds herself overwhelmed with a propensity for destruction. “I thought you _died_.”

Max hits her with the impossible. “I’ve been travelling through time.”

Chloe laughs— _laughs_. Incredulous and loud, because—of course. _Of course_. “I don’t believe you.”

“Of course you don’t. But you’re leaving town to live in California.” Max tells her. “You make it to Portland and you don’t ever leave.”

The words are like stakes. “You don’t know _shit_ , Max.” She spits. She hasn’t told anyone she’s leaving. Not even her Mom.

“I know it because I’ve seen it.” Max tells her simply, and there is a kindness that Chloe has come to regard as foreign in the girl’s eyes. She looks so much older. Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five.

“What else have you seen?” Chloe asks, and Max tells her.

**IV.**

She doesn’t make it out of Portland. She gets a crappy one bedroom, no furniture and no bed. She sleeps on a foam futon mattress on the floor.

Sometimes, Max is there. Sometimes she is not. Chloe is nothing but a moment in time.

**V.**

Chloe is seated on her counter, one of her three cups—a coffee mug from Palm Springs—in her hands. She’s drinking water and Max is seated on the floor where Chloe sometimes imagines putting a dining table. She sips and swallows, and wonders how long she has.

“How long has this even been happening? When did it start?” It’s a simple question, but one she has been afraid to ask for some time now.

Max laughs, _actually laughs_ , at the question, like Chloe has told a joke. “When do you think?”

**VI.**

It happens sometimes.

Chloe sometimes muses how odd it is for her to grow older and to watch a fifteen year old Max grow up in the snapshots that time will allow them. Max comes to her as a seventeen year old, a twenty year old, a thirty-five year old. Never once, Chloe notices, has her friend shown her face any younger than seventeen.

It happens, for the first time, on a November afternoon. Chloe has taken a job at a nearby office as a receptionist. Her basic need for money to fund her basic needs for food and shelter prompt her into dying her hair back to it’s natural brown that she finds limp and plain in the mirror. She is twenty-four years old, she still has no furniture.

Max is soaked, standing in her apartment in the same grey sweater and worn, dark washed jeans. Brown hair is plastered to her forehead in knotty, parallel rows.

Max, a child, turns to face her. “Chloe?”

She’s so young. “Max.”

There is a pause that says nothing and everything, Max is trembling in a peculiar concoction of fear and hypothermia. “I’m _scared_ ,” she tells Chloe.

Chloe, to her credit, makes a promise. “Don’t worry, I’ll be here.”

**VII.**

“You’re my anchor, you know?” Max relents one day. She is nineteen years old, and she’s dressed in Chloe’s old clothes, which hang on her loosely as she sips boxed wine from a mug.

They’re laying side by side in forlorn, parallel rows on Chloe’s bed without a boxspring. “You keep me here,” Max continues, and her words are as loose as her shirt.

“Thanks for choosing me,” Chloe replies, and her voice is airy, but her mind is moving at the speed of light. There is an unseen calculation to her as she maps the swoop of Max’s collarbone, framed by red and black plaid.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Max says honestly, and then yawns. “It was no contest.”

**VIII.**

Her mother spends the better part of three months trying to convince her to come back to Arcadia Bay for the holidays, but if there’s one thing that Chloe has never been, it’s easy to deal with.

Joyce caves, and Chloe has the time to ponder how she’s going to explain to her mother the presence of a woman in her apartment who _is_ Max Caulfield, but not the one that Joyce knew.

It’s easier than Chloe was expecting. When her mother buzzes to be let in, Chloe holds the button marked _open_ down until she’s satisfied with the click. She answers the door at the knock.

Max stands in the living room holding three glasses in between her fingers on one hand, and a bottle of merlot in the other. She is twenty-two years old. Joyce takes one look at her, and then glances at Chloe.

“It’s her.” Joyce informs her daughter, and the tone of her voice lets Chloe know just which _her_ Joyce is talking about.

**IX.**

“You’ve always been with me.” Chloe says afterwards. They’re lying on an air bed in the living room. Chloe has given up her mattress on the ground for her mother, the guest in her home and her life. “From the day I was born.”

“It hasn’t happened for me, yet.” Max admits, and then shrugs with a sheepish smile. “I was thinking of taking a trip back to Arcadia soon, though. I haven’t been back—since.”

“From the day I was born,” Chloe repeats. “You drove my mom to the hospital when she was in labor. You’re the only thing that never changes.” She thinks back to the concept of anchors, and wonders who is weighing who down exactly.

“Do you miss me? When I’m gone, I mean?” It almost feels like a non-sequitur, and Chloe almost opens her mouth to answer honestly. She isn’t losing her cool here. Not when Max has so many other advantages.

_Always_ , she wants to say. _Every time_ , she wants to say. _It feels like years when you aren’t here_ , she wants to say.

“A little.” She says.

It’s Chloe’s turn for a little daring question of her own. “Can you stay?” She asks. “Even just for a few days. It’s Christmas, Max.”

To her credit, Max makes no promises. “I can try.”

**X.**

Chloe wakes, and Max is gone. The mattress next to her is stark and empty, the duvet where Max was asleep the previous night still rumpled, like she’s gotten up for a glass of water and she’ll be right back.

Chloe closes her eyes and tries to hear the sound of running water. Her imagination fails her. It figures.

**Author's Note:**

> so this is something that exists. i'll be honest, i'm not a huge fan of this and i think you can pinpoint exactly where in this that i sort of gave up. it's been sitting in an open word doc on my laptop for about a week so i mostly finished it just to finish it. i might come back to it and edit it at some point, but i'm not sure. it didn't come out exactly how i had hoped. thank you for reading, as always! the title is from _braille_ by regina spektor.


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